Society And Culture

New research shows that every year spent in prison lowers overall life expectancy two years. Read More

Emilie M. Townes, a distinguished Yale University scholar and administrator whose areas of expertise include Christian ethics and womanist theology, has been named dean of Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Read More

Few musicians win their first orchestral audition, and the likelihood that the first audition is with the prestigious Vienna Philharmonic is very slim. That puts Jeremy Wilson, Blair School of Music's new associate professor of trombone, in a class all by himself. Read More

The Appalachian Dulcimer Archive contains sound clips of David Schnaufer playing various dulcimers, photos and history about dulcimers from Schnaufer’s collection, biographical material about Schnaufer and other information. Read More

David Blackbourn (John Russell/Vanderbilt) Communicating with the departed is something David Blackbourn does on a daily basis. As a scholar of German history and the Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair in History, he sees his life’s work as a way to “get into the heads of dead people.”… Read More

The Rev. Jaco Hamman’s decision to avoid the draft for the South African military, which was responsible for enforcing apartheid, propelled his 1993 move from his native country to the United States, where work as a hospital chaplain shaped his career. Read More

Through a set of experiments, Gordon Logan, Nashville musician Jerry Kimbrough and Matthew Crump (now of Brooklyn College-CUNY) have illustrated that guitarists – and players of other related instruments like mandolin, banjo and bass – tend to acquire their skills differently than most other musicians. Read More

Eight Vanderbilt mathematicians have been named as members of the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Read More

Perhaps pulled more into mainstream consciousness by television shows such as “Hard Core Pawn” and “Pawn Stars,” pawn shops have several advantages over the payday loan operations that have become the most visible source of loans for those with poor credit ratings. Read More

Duke University announced that Blair alumna Angela Mace, now pursuing her Ph.D. in musicology at Duke under the advisement of R. Larry Todd, has proved the authorship of a mystery “lost sonata.” The piece has often been attributed to 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn, although scholars have suspected the piece was actually written by his sister, Fanny Hensel. Read More

“Stage & Screen: The Star Quality of Vanderbilt’s Performing Arts Collections,” now open at Vanderbilt University’s renovated Central Library and Special Collections, invites viewers to step “behind the curtain” of some of the world’s most memorable productions. Read More

Vanderbilt’s MFA Program in Creative Writing has been ranked among the top 10 programs in the country in a survey conducted by "Poets & Writers" magazine and reported in the September/October issue. Read More

A Nashville songwriter responsible for No. 1 records by George Strait, Lee Ann Womack and Gary Allan is showing aspiring songwriters the Music Row ropes in a class at Vanderbilt University. Read More

Vanderbilt archaeologist Tiffiny Tung leads students to Peru where they assist in groundbreaking research into the Wari culture, a society that existed over 1500 years ago. Tung is the recipient of the 2011-12 Chancellor’s Cup.  The award is given annually for “the greatest contribution outside the classroom to undergraduate student-faculty… Read More

The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt will use $10,000 from the NEA to study correlations between art-making and quality of life. Read More

'Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems' has earned Austin Community College's annual Balcones Poetry Prize. Read More

Vanderbilt University Writer-in-Residence Alice Randall credits the school’s creative and interdisciplinary approaches to obesity-related diseases like diabetes with providing “fertile ground” for her new novel, Ada’s Rules (Bloomsbury USA). Read More

"My goal is to be the last fat black woman in my family," writes Alice Randall, writer in residence at Vanderbilt and author of "Ada's Rules." Read More

The responsibilities of family life tend to impede political participation by women in the Americas, a new study from the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University shows. Read More

Digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that author Robert Penn Warren conducted with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other key leaders in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement are now searchable through the Who Speaks for the Negro website housed at Vanderbilt University. Read More